Daddy-Long-Legs eBook

Blue Wednesday

The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly
Awful Day—­a day to be awaited with dread,
endured with courage and forgotten with haste.
Every floor must be spotless, every chair dustless,
and every bed without a wrinkle. Ninety-seven
squirming little orphans must be scrubbed and combed
and buttoned into freshly starched ginghams; and all
ninety-seven reminded of their manners, and told to
say, `Yes, sir,’ `No, sir,’ whenever a
Trustee spoke.

It was a distressing time; and poor Jerusha Abbott,
being the oldest orphan, had to bear the brunt of
it. But this particular first Wednesday, like
its predecessors, finally dragged itself to a close.
Jerusha escaped from the pantry where she had been
making sandwiches for the asylum’s guests, and
turned upstairs to accomplish her regular work.
Her special care was room F, where eleven little
tots, from four to seven, occupied eleven little cots
set in a row. Jerusha assembled her charges,
straightened their rumpled frocks, wiped their noses,
and started them in an orderly and willing line towards
the dining-room to engage themselves for a blessed
half hour with bread and milk and prune pudding.

Then she dropped down on the window seat and leaned
throbbing temples against the cool glass. She
had been on her feet since five that morning, doing
everybody’s bidding, scolded and hurried by a
nervous matron. Mrs. Lippett, behind the scenes,
did not always maintain that calm and pompous dignity
with which she faced an audience of Trustees and lady
visitors. Jerusha gazed out across a broad stretch
of frozen lawn, beyond the tall iron paling that marked
the confines of the asylum, down undulating ridges
sprinkled with country estates, to the spires of the
village rising from the midst of bare trees.

The day was ended—­quite successfully, so
far as she knew. The Trustees and the visiting
committee had made their rounds, and read their reports,
and drunk their tea, and now were hurrying home to
their own cheerful firesides, to forget their bothersome
little charges for another month. Jerusha leaned
forward watching with curiosity—­and a touch
of wistfulness—­the stream of carriages
and automobiles that rolled out of the asylum gates.
In imagination she followed first one equipage, then
another, to the big houses dotted along the hillside.
She pictured herself in a fur coat and a velvet hat
trimmed with feathers leaning back in the seat and
nonchalantly murmuring `Home’ to the driver.
But on the door-sill of her home the picture grew
blurred.

Jerusha had an imagination—­an imagination,
Mrs. Lippett told her, that would get her into trouble
if she didn’t take care—­but keen
as it was, it could not carry her beyond the front
porch of the houses she would enter. Poor, eager,
adventurous little Jerusha, in all her seventeen years,
had never stepped inside an ordinary house; she could
not picture the daily routine of those other human
beings who carried on their lives undiscommoded by
orphans.